UE Question

[Golrith]

Setting up a mod pack that includes UE, but I've seen various posts on this forum about UE balance not being "right" but no further details.

What exactly causes UE to be out of balance when used with MJ systems? (My pack doesn't include EU, so not worried about that side of things).

I see that the UE config has values for conversion (and I think generation), so it seems the default values could be tweaked to bring it more "inline" with existing standards of generation/conversion.

 

[Mjw]

i think the values should be fixed in later versions

 

[Golrith]

Yes, but what values, what is the issue? Details would be nice.

 

[Someguy]

I'm also curious about this. With all the kerfuffle about GregTech and its effective removal from the pack (yeah I know about Unhinged, but it's like... barely a pack...) I finally decided to go the route of rolling my own pack and I added in a bunch of the UE family mods for the first time.

I'm finding, however, that information on those mods is limited. Most of their own wiki pages are non-existent. See here (http://wiki.universalelectricity.com/)

 

[RedBoss]

This is a great mod spotlight on Mekanism.

 

[Someguy]

Thanks, that is indeed a good spotlight. Pleasant voice to listen to and relatively little hemming and hawing.

Yeah, I said it. Sorry, other spotlighters... I still love you, really.*


* : Not really.

 

[gattsuru]

What exactly causes UE to be out of balance when used with MJ systems? (My pack doesn't include EU, so not worried about that side of things).

There are two major 'power' mods in UE that are relevant, AtomicScience and Mekanism. Atomic Science's fusion generators are slightly better for the space than a Steam Boiler, but they're also more complicated, expensive (requiring diamonds), and moving uranium around can be dangerous. Fusion and antimatter reactions are incredibly energy-positive, but they represent the investment equivalent of arbitrary numbers of 36-size boilers and farms -- the biggest problem is that they take enough horizontal space to lead to concerns about chunkloader availability.

Mekanism is the tricky part, in a couple ways. It's better balanced than it used to be, by an order of magnitude, so pretty much any complaint from May is no longer accurate. The trick is more the underlying mechanics. It's incredibly inefficient with non-renewable fuels. You actually get fewer smelts using coal in a Heat Generator to power an Energized Smelter than you would simply running vanilla Furnace. On the other side, however, every single generator has a renewable or passive mode. Placing five lava blocks around a heat generator produces the equivalent of a burnt coal or charcoal every 32 seconds -- and heat generators are fairly inexpensive to build. Hydrogen Generators can end up being somewhat complicated to build the first time, but once put together a mere handful will output enough place-and-forget energy to power a small home base.

That wouldn't matter if UE was in its own power setup, but Mekanism also includes (fairly cheap) Universal Cables, which can convert from UE to EU and MJ. And ThermalExpansion takes some drastically different balance assumptions -- the large amount of on-device power storage is something that's necessary in the MJ economy, but contrary to Mekanism's early-game thoughts. It's less than the conversion ratios are wrong, and more that the two concepts conflict. It's trivial to set up a 1-5 MJ/t in passive power production with just heat generators, and while that's not going to make ThermalExpansion explode, it's also something TE presumes doesn't exist.

On the gripping hand, you may not /care/. Most folk in modded Minecraft aren't exactly here to carefully balance coal use, and especially in a pack with inexpensive farming (such as in MineFactory Reloaded), it's not exactly difficult to have infinite fuel loops. Mekanism lacks any serious burst power capability and gets costly to scale upward, so it's not terrible for end-game stuff like mining lasers et all.

((There's also the larger problem where EU's power scaling is logarithmic to the linear scaling on MJ. Not relevant in your case, but essentially any GregTech-sane EU power supply breaks the local MJ economy even at 10 EU-1 MJ.))

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Having played around with Mekanism in an otherwise MJ-exclusive environment (ShneekeyCraft test pack), I have a lot of good things to say.

First off, while Steel isn't that particularly high on the tech list, it IS rather firmly gated to requiring power to create. And there's really only one generator you can make that doesn't require steel frames... the Thermal Generator. It requires quite a bit of Osmium, which isn't too hard to find, but its power output is anemic at best, even with fuel. So it can be a bit difficult to get going.

Having said that, if you build four of them, then surround them with lava, you've got decent power generation for your early-game base. You can probably get there with nothing more than a clockwork engine (if you have Forestry installed) for the Pulverizer (since Osmium didn't work in the AE grinder in the version I used) and Powered Furnace (because why not?). It's a way to bootstrap yourself into a passive energy network which will at least keep a pulverizer and powered furnace going.

The machines in Mekanism are deceptively amazing. There's a tool you'll have to look for called the Configurator. With this device, Mekanism machines are configurable much like Thermal Expansion machines are! And you can throw overclock upgrades into them for more speed. More importantly are the Factories, which let you process multiple slots simultaneously. In fact, once you get firmly established, I'd suggest upgrading from Thermal Expansion's Pulverizer -> Induction Smelter + Powered Furnace setup to the full 3x output setup. It's power-hungry as heck, but it will process with better yield and far faster once you include upgrades.

There are many different types of passive energy generation, which some people have problems with, claiming it to be 'too easy'. However, the difficulty here isn't in fueling them, it is placing them. For example, you need Heat generators to have lava on five of the six sides to have full output. You're now playing with lava in tricky close quarters... don't fall in the sweet n sour sauce! Or let it spill out either. Windmills need wide open spaces to function properly. Solar obviously needs to see the sun. There are design and engineering challenges involved in each of these, and the costs for the solar panels are decidedly non-trivial. They are certainly the most expensive basic Mekanism generator, and the arrays are even moreso.

Having said that, the mod author has stated he will be removing MJ compatibility from his mod going forward, which will effectively kill any and all interest in the mod itself.

 

[Golrith]

Thanks for the feedback. I think it's nothing worth worrying about. I've run my base before on 4 peat fired engines, maximum 4mj/t. Perfectly fine for a non-automated mining setup.

I saw that comment about not supporting MJ, seems more of a mod author conflict rather then any technical difficulty. Even after the BC update to the conductive pipes, I personally feel they are still pointless (and in fact feel too much like IC2 different cables).

 

[Jakeb]

Others have already mentioned the passive power generation in mekanism, which some think is to OP, easy, or cheap. Personally, I don't really care, because about the only two that have decent power output are the advanced solar gens and the hydrogen gens, both of which are expensive, and the hydrogen gen is somewhat complicated to setup.
I don't think anyone has mentioned atomic science steam turbines, though. You can use steam from any source, so you can effectively multiply your power output many times by using steam turbines instead of steam engines when using a railcraft boiler, for instance. Combined with a few oil fab's, it's really easy and simpe to setup an extremely powerful infinite power loop this way.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Others have already mentioned the passive power generation in mekanism, which some think is to OP, easy, or cheap. Personally, I don't really care, because about the only two that have decent power output are the advanced solar gens and the hydrogen gens, both of which are expensive, and the hydrogen gen is somewhat complicated to setup.
I don't think anyone has mentioned atomic science steam turbines, though. You can use steam from any source, so you can effectively multiply your power output many times by using steam turbines instead of steam engines when using a railcraft boiler, for instance. Combined with a few oil fab's, it's really easy and simpe to setup an extremely powerful infinite power loop this way.

That would make oil fabs power-positive? I was given to understand that oil fabs were designed to be power-negative or at best power-neutral.

 

[Daemonblue]

Others have already mentioned the passive power generation in mekanism, which some think is to OP, easy, or cheap. Personally, I don't really care, because about the only two that have decent power output are the advanced solar gens and the hydrogen gens, both of which are expensive, and the hydrogen gen is somewhat complicated to setup.
I don't think anyone has mentioned atomic science steam turbines, though. You can use steam from any source, so you can effectively multiply your power output many times by using steam turbines instead of steam engines when using a railcraft boiler, for instance. Combined with a few oil fab's, it's really easy and simpe to setup an extremely powerful infinite power loop this way.

Yup, a large reactor turbine (3x3 small turbines, hit middle with a wrench) produces more power than 18 industrial steam engines, yet a single 36HP boiler can power 9 of em, so yea. Also, there has been mention that you can funnel off the steam from nuclear reactors using the funnels and pipes and can power multiple turbines with a single reactor, but I haven't actually seen it myself. With assembly line you can use the manipulator arm to refuel the fission reactors as well.

Hydrogen generators are not that hard to set up, especially if you use more than one, and produce tons of power. While I'm not sure on the exact numbers, a single hydrogen generator can easily power an early base and then some, With multiple hydrogen gens you can have a single one set to loop the energy gen while the rest power every thing, though with a single hydrogen generator you have to use a couple of energy cubes and set em up right.

But yea, the real problem deals with power gen via steam and the extremely powerful passive generators since they throw off the balance that other power systems build. The easiest way to see this is, of course, in how much energy the Mekanism machines consume vs their IC2 and TE counterparts. Mekanism machines seem to need 3x the power as TE machines for similar uses, thus meaning energy generation has to be a lot higher, which makes it a bit unbalanced when you combine UE generation with TE efficiency.

That said, once the power imbalances are tuned to more appropriate levels the mods will play a lot better together. I personally like the idea of the factories and processing up to seven items at a time, but the power draw requires a lot of infrastructure to run properly.

If you want a challenge, don't use Atomic Science or Mekanism generators. Only power your base via EU and/or MJ and actually use the high tier Mekanism machines. This will probably require a few 36HP boilers to keep powered properly.

Another thing to note, Mekanism's enrichment chamber gives more redstone and lapis than TE's pulverizer, and you can enrich charcoal to use as "fuel" in making UE steel in the metallurgic infuser.

Edit: Regarding the oil fabs, railcraft boilers with industrial steam engines are already power positive when at max heat when using industrial steam engines. Since large reactor turbines are about 9x more efficient at using steam it's easy to see why it's incredibly power positive when using that setup.

 

[Loufmier]

Also, there has been mention that you can funnel off the steam from nuclear reactors using the funnels and pipes and can power multiple turbines with a single reactor, but I haven't actually seen it myself. With assembly line you can use the manipulator arm to refuel the fission reactors as well.

there are such builds on RR server, and i did test em and it works. you just put steam funnels above water, and then extract steam with powered liquiducts.
hopper can put fuel into fusion and fission reactors, so i assume AE and pipes can do same directly

 

[Jakeb]

Yeah, I believe an oil fab needs 600,000 mj to make one bucket of oil, so it's a little bit power negative when using combustions. I think a max size, fully heated railcraft boiler produces somewhere around 850,000 mj per bucket of fuel, so that's a little bit power positive. With the turbines, it is ridiculously power positive.[DOUBLEPOST=1374519021][/DOUBLEPOST]

there are such builds on RR server, and i did test em and it works. you just put steam funnels above water, and then extract steam with powered liquiducts.
hopper can put fuel into fusion and fission reactors, so i assume AE and pipes can do same directly

Yeah, I built something like that in a creative test world, and it's basically infinite power. I got over 150 large turbines before I got bored and quit, and I think at that point its well above 22,000 mj/t. I built a similar setup in my survival world, but with 25 large turbines, and I had to shut it off because I had no use for that much power.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

An organic power generation system using mekanism that I've come up wtih:

Start off with 1-4 thermal generators. These will get you off the ground and your ore refinery set up and running smoothly, possibly with enough left over for a small AE network.

Build 5 Hydrogen generators and support. Use the thermal generators as your 'jump start' energy supply, providing the electrolytic converters with energy in the event of a blackout to be able to restart the system. Your main feed will be an energy cube running from your main power output, the thermals are your backup power to kickstart the system in the event of total blackout.

Windmills are crazy good for 'spot' energy, such as running MFR farming/ranching setups. Build your windmill right on the spot and have each section of your automation be its own independent energy system. This is a basic decentralized power network system, so that even if the lights go dark in your main base, you will continue to gain these resources constantly (although if your ME Network goes offline, your throughput may get backlogged).

 

[Loufmier]

Yeah, I built something like that in a creative test world, and it's basically infinite power. I got over 150 large turbines before I got bored and quit, and I think at that point its well above 22,000 mj/t. I built a similar setup in my survival world, but with 25 large turbines, and I had to shut it off because I had no use for that much power.

you still have to setup an infinite fuel supply for that thing, which can be tricky if there is no IC2 around. but i think main purpose for such amounts of power is to build particle accelerator and strange matter farm, for duping things. also antimatter explosives...

 

[KirinDave]

Yup, a large reactor turbine (3x3 small turbines, hit middle with a wrench) produces more power than 18 industrial steam engines, yet a single 36HP boiler can power 9 of em, so yea. Also, there has been mention that you can funnel off the steam from nuclear reactors using the funnels and pipes and can power multiple turbines with a single reactor, but I haven't actually seen it myself. With assembly line you can use the manipulator arm to refuel the fission reactors as well.

So this is something near and dear to me. My advice is to reconfigure it, and we're preparing a set of compat recommendations with Calclavia. You can see the current values we're working with here, and this will remain updated with our experiments. This will be refined further over time, but this is a good start.

We've tuned nuclear reactors to be substantially better than boilers, but also more obnoxious to automate. I humbly recommend you do the same. Turbines will probably always have an edge over steam engines, but any pack with Mekanism finds the cost of industrial steam engines somewhat trivialized so I am not sure it matters.

To summarize, this requires 60% more steam (observed, the exact curve varies by usage) to spin up the turbine, 10x more steam to maintain it, and cuts the output of the turbine itself to around 15mj/t (I think... the turbine behavior is not a linear function so it can be difficult to summarize our findings without rendering out a graph for you). You also need to make sure that if you use Mekanism, you sync up those values as well. Euius, Poppycocks and recently Velo did a nice job slowly refining this for us on that as well, but of course it's subject to refinement.

Hydrogen generators are not that hard to set up, especially if you use more than one, and produce tons of power. While I'm not sure on the exact numbers, a single hydrogen generator can easily power an early base and then some, With multiple hydrogen gens you can have a single one set to loop the energy gen while the rest power every thing, though with a single hydrogen generator you have to use a couple of energy cubes and set em up right.

I am not bragging, but almost no one on our servers has gotten a stable hydrogen self-looped power system on our servers as their primary supply but me. Heck, it is almost a vanity build. They shut down hard if you overdraw them, which makes them very temperamental in a loop. The recommended way to use them is to power them off heat generators and use them as a "power amplifier" of sorts. This setup is massive, requires water pipes and standing lava and a build with a eye towards fire control.

Mekanism machines seem to need 3x the power as TE machines for similar uses, thus meaning energy generation has to be a lot higher, which makes it a bit unbalanced when you combine UE generation with TE efficiency. That said, once the power imbalances are tuned to more appropriate levels the mods will play a lot better together. I personally like the idea of the factories and processing up to seven items at a time, but the power draw requires a lot of infrastructure to run properly.

The power draw for a max overclocked 7x ore processing system is ENORMOUS. I had one in my let's play and I actually got it to run itself down and back up my quarry twice running off 8x Fuel-fired milk fed force engines (which were also driving a quarry, but yeah TE would never choke there even with for parallel lines).

FTB's UE pack never really had reasonable energy values in its configs because they haven't updated to reflect modern UE development.[DOUBLEPOST=1374519816][/DOUBLEPOST]

An organic power generation system using mekanism that I've come up wtih:

Start off with 1-4 thermal generators. These will get you off the ground and your ore refinery set up and running smoothly, possibly with enough left over for a small AE network.

Build 5 Hydrogen generators and support. Use the thermal generators as your 'jump start' energy supply, providing the electrolytic converters with energy in the event of a blackout to be able to restart the system. Your main feed will be an energy cube running from your main power output, the thermals are your backup power to kickstart the system in the event of total blackout.

Windmills are crazy good for 'spot' energy, such as running MFR farming/ranching setups. Build your windmill right on the spot and have each section of your automation be its own independent energy system. This is a basic decentralized power network system, so that even if the lights go dark in your main base, you will continue to gain these resources constantly (although if your ME Network goes offline, your throughput may get backlogged).

Huh this strategy seems familiar.

 

[Daemonblue]

I actually did my initial loop design based on your videos myself as well, but instead of thermal generators I used a hobbyists' steam engine for my first power gen. All I had to do wo loop power for one hydrogen gen was make sure I had the bigger energy cube in my system feeding into the loop. As I had mentioned before though with more hydrogen gens this becomes less of an issue since you can have a hydrogen gen dedicated specifically to powering the electrolytic separators from the rest of them. Basically it would just amount to having a separate hydrogen generator keeping the rest alive in such as a way that it can never be overdrawn.

 

[KirinDave]

I actually did my initial loop design based on your videos myself as well, but instead of thermal generators I used a hobbyists' steam engine for my first power gen. All I had to do wo loop power for one hydrogen gen was make sure I had the bigger energy cube in my system feeding into the loop. As I had mentioned before though with more hydrogen gens this becomes less of an issue since you can have a hydrogen gen dedicated specifically to powering the electrolytic separators from the rest of them. Basically it would just amount to having a separate hydrogen generator keeping the rest alive in such as a way that it can never be overdrawn.

Hah never say never to power overdraw when you have a growing AE network Voltage issues can also be a pain.

 

[Loufmier]

Voltage issues can also be a pain.

is voltage even a thing with universal cable?